


(all alone, you say that you don’t want) No Other

by Riathel



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Enemies to Lovers, Grief, Heartbreak, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Missing Scene, Non-Chronological, POV Alternating, Poor Life Choices, The Doctor (Doctor Who) is a Mess, Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:47:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23410426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riathel/pseuds/Riathel
Summary: They dance across the galaxy in their own approximation of love.Romance tastes like ashes. It becomes the thin bones with which the Doctor uses to pick stars out of his teeth, to roll nebulas behind the worrying gap in his molars.It's not a dance unless someone is winning. It's not a fight unless someone is leading. It doesn't feel like love until he can taste bile stinging the back of his throat and tears in his eyes and wasted time in his heart.The Doctor has few occasions to think about his relationship with the Master.(The Master has many occasions to regret his relationship with the Doctor.)
Relationships: Eighth Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who: TV Movie), Fifth Doctor/The Master (Ainley), Second Doctor/The Master (War Chief), Seventh Doctor/The Master (Ainley), Sixth Doctor/The Master (Ainley), Tenth Doctor/The Master (Simm), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 31





	1. II

**Author's Note:**

> This was the first fic I wrote for the Doctor Who fandom, with me just trying to sort through my feelings about each Doctor/Master incarnation. It was drawer fic for ages and ages just because, tbh, I find it very self-indulgent and it’s not yet finished (and might not ever be finished). However, [extryn](%E2%80%9C) told me I ought to post it, so here we are. I hope you enjoy it! I’ll be uploading all the chapters fairly quickly. Title is from the song “No Other” by Gene Clark, which I think is peak Doctor/Master feelings. Heed the chapter titles for which incarnation is which.

They talk about their lives without ever discussing them.

Which is to say, sometimes the Master disappears, and the Doctor does not know where he goes. But this is alright. He has become accustomed to it, over the length of their involvement. Sometimes he disappears, sometimes he dies. But he returns. He always returns for the Doctor.

This is both the best and the worst aspect of the Master. He is patient. And the Doctor forgets, often, always, how deeply that runs, how easy it is for him to bide his time, thinking, watching, deliberating, weighing up variables over and over to his exacting, aching standards and, as ever, finding the Doctor wanting at the critical moment.

There are stories that are not told.

(The Doctor finds him before it’s time on Taris, some irrelevant backwater of a planet. He says _please let me help you_ without saying any words at all.)

The words would be meaningless anyway, because there is nothing of the Master there, not even his name, not anymore, not when his plans, his rituals, have been disrupted; just a thin, paranoid nervous system wearing his skin and his bones and his eyes and his smile.

A thin, paranoid nervous system with a happy trigger finger and a world full of ionic weapons.

The Doctor fails and everyone dies.

(This is not the success that the Master craves.

Especially when the Doctor looks at him so vacantly; a puppet of the Time Lords. The loss goads him into fitful peaks of anger. This is not the universe they were made to inherit.)


	2. V

Sometimes the Master stays, lingers, like the push and pull of their individual gravities becomes too much to escape from, and the Doctor blusters and scorns and hopes his edges will wear down.

But the part of him that fades, like bright fabric bleached after too long in the sun, is what one could only charitably call his _good_ part.

(They are alone in the TARDIS, like they should always be, and the Doctor wants to speak to him, but the Master does not want to listen.)

On those occasions, the Doctor watches the Master implode, and thinks about Taris, and thinks about Traken, and thinks about a hundred other worlds, and a billion other lives he has failed to save, and says nothing. Does nothing.

He has cause to regret that.


	3. VI

( _You let me burn_ the Master wants to say, but he doesn't, because the Doctor's coat is too vulgar, and he has never trusted the number six. He will wait until the next one. He will hold onto the feeling of burning. He will make the Doctor know it, intimately, the acrid smell of flesh crackling under heat, the terrible, wretched pain of it, oh, yes, the Doctor will know all of it and more, and more still.

The Master does not wonder if any of it will ever be enough, because he knows it will not. This is not a point in the Doctor's favour.)

They dance across the galaxy in their own approximation of love.

Romance tastes like ashes. It becomes the thin bones with which the Doctor uses to pick stars out of his teeth, to roll nebulas behind the worrying gap in his molars.

It's not a dance unless someone is winning. It's not a fight unless someone is leading. It doesn't feel like love until he can taste bile stinging the back of his throat and tears in his eyes and wasted time in his heart.


	4. X

(They are together in the TARDIS, and the Doctor does not want to listen, and the Master wants to speak to him.

He's never been very good at taking no for an answer. Age has not improved his custom; it has withered him. They are the last two Time Lords across all the universes. This is exactly the victory he has craved for so long. A victory that has been rendered into stale impotence by the tender rape of time and his own fucking surge of conscience. It makes him drive harder into his pitch blackness, chasing shadows to burn out the taste of being a good coward.

He has wanted so many things. Immortality. Universal domination. Fear. Respect. Adoration.

Now he merely wants the Doctor's pain.)

The Doctor sees the trap and walks into it anyway.

(This is his best and worst aspect.)

It involves a volatiser, a string, and the bitter taste of romance at the back of the Doctor's throat. He opens the door, lunges for the bomb, and snatches it into his hands just before it hits the music room floor.

As he defuses it, sliding the core out with a shudder of breath, the real trap is sprung. The spent volatiser clatters from his hands as the Master is on him, lunging for his throat, his eyes, exploding in a flurry of bites and scratches, spitting out hissed chokes of breath, the grinding gears of Gallifreyan running from his tongue like it can escape its own death.

The Doctor knows that if he struggles, this will be bad, and if he doesn't struggle, this will be bad.

Today feels like a bleak day.

(Pale skin tears, tissue-thin, beneath the claws that the Master's body is surprised to remember. The Doctor stares up at him with those large, brown eyes, his gaze level and sad.

The Master punches him in the mouth. The Doctor winces, his bottom lip cracking open, blood springing from the cut.

He could ask him to struggle, or cry, or kiss him, but it seems too much like pleading, so he punches the Doctor in the mouth again instead.)

“All good things come to those who lie in wait for them,” the Master says, his words belied by how thready and frantic his voice is. His thumb traces the Doctor's split lip, dragging blood into the corners of his mouth and out, out, like a demented, stretched smile painted on his face. The Master smiles back at him. It's terrible, because the Doctor thinks it lends his features a softer air, transformed with the slight curve of his mouth.

Even if his eyes are bloodshot, even when he looks so far from the person he was when they were young and love involved laughter and joy and not a countless string of genocides, a dull blur of inadequacies that the Doctor had claimed the worst victory in.

(And he would never forgive him for taking that away.)

“And,” the Doctor says, quiet, hoarse, “how long have you been waiting?”

For long minutes, the Master doesn't reply. He traces his work again, and again, until the blood stops dribbling out of the shallow wound, and his smile drips away. “Three hundred and fifty seven years, nine days, fourteen hundred trillion hours.” He pauses after his absurd, dysregulated calculation, slides a blood-slick claw across the Doctor's closed wound to reopen it, and adds, “And, oh, fifty- _six_ minutes?”

His mouth rests open, as he stares up at the Master. A wickedly sharp claw slips between his slack lips.

He had plans, in the beginning, for this situation. Helping is what he does. If there's anything he can claim a specialty in, it should have been that. Hi, I'm the Doctor, and I'm here to (fuck it all up) help.

“Nothing to say, Doctor?” the Master asks, pleasantly, pressing against the sensitive flat of the Doctor's tongue. His beard has grown patchy and irregular. He would have hated it like that.

It's hard to reconcile his memories of the Master with the person before him, like a puzzle that doesn't meet the image on the box, one that's been so warped and fragmented, torn apart and reassembled so many times the Doctor's not sure if any of the original pieces still remain. If all that's left of what he once was now only exists in the remnants of the Doctor's dreams.

Since the War, all his dreams have turned into nightmares. It's only fitting that this should follow suit.

He stares at the Master and says nothing, because the Doctor is not sure what he can say, if there is any kindness left in him that hasn't been meticulously burnt out by being the winner.

Instead, he relaxes. He can't smile, or grin, with the finger in his mouth, so he presses his tongue against the sharp edge. His own blood is enough of a reward, even if it mixes poorly with the acid gagging his throat.

The Master curses in Gallifreyan. Reduces a beautiful fragment of time into non-existence, lays the ashes of a planet at the Doctor's feet, demands he get on his hands and knees and clean their lineage off the floor, orders him to beg for his life, for his skin, to atone for the way their narrative has gone so wrong, for the way that time itself shies at their touch, repulsed at their disorders, at their failures, and when none of those words suffice, the Master says, “Fuck you,” and leaves.


	5. III

(UNIT HQ should really keep a better guard on their side entrances.

But the Doctor never seems too concerned with how he gets in, just that he leaves, with the utmost haste, in the morning. The flap that he gets in about the fragile little drones that work here manages to further irritate and endear the Master. Then again, he wouldn't be the Doctor without his eccentricities.

The dying TARDIS throbs around them in the dark. She won't perish, but her core systems are fluttering and fading in erratic ebbs and flows, and grief that is not his own presses in too deeply at him. The Doctor's emotional regulation has not improved with age. It spills out of him, badly contained radiation, and every night there is a terrible fallout to contend with.

They work together on her as well as they always did. Always do.

Then, as the Doctor insists on a human sleeping schedule, on a human _bed_ , the Master spends the rest of the night afforded a different release of tension.

He can see every strand of the Doctor's hair. He wonders if that has changed much. Once, in a drowsy autumnal afternoon, he'd counted them all. The number still settles on his tongue every time with the taste of that frizzy, ungroomed hair: the sweat, the oils, the tang of it, the essence of their fragile youth.

They're a bit older now, a bit less well aligned, but the Doctor hasn't ever said no to his nightly visits and he knows, he knows he will convince the Doctor to greater purposes.

Perhaps it's the effect of the Doctor sleeping beside him, one of his hands splayed heavily across the Master's chest as if to anchor him to this point in space and time, but he begins to dwell in lazy wisps of fantasy. Sleeping feels too much like an invitation to unguarded risk, but he does let his eyes close. There, in the darkness behind his eyes, he sketches out well worn thoughts about an empire, his empire, the complete and total subjugation of the universe to his, singular will. Of course, the Doctor must play centre stage in this dream too — he wouldn't accept anything less than to be a partner in this, and in everything else they set their considerable talents towards.

Still, the thought of the Doctor sometimes shifts into territories where he's on his knees, a heavy collar around his throat, and his moralising tongue being put to far better uses...

At that, the Master opens his eyes and presses in closer, hears the Doctor hum in sleepy confusion, and then, minutes later, his rhythms unfurl: the stuttered gasp as his breath hitches, his heartsbeat increase, the badly suppressed whimper, fingers digging at his wrists, the broken moan—

After all, he’s not running a charity.)

“What did you see?” the Master asks. His voice is light, almost fond, as he traces a circular pattern of equations into the Doctor's hipbone.

He makes out radial spirals of unhappy composites, sigma solved by theta, and then, simplistic relaxation setting in, a repeated, slow trace of mine, mine, mine, in the time it takes before he responds, “Hm?”

“From my machine.” _Mine._ The possessive turns from endearing to nauseating in a brief instant.

He sighs. “My dear fellow, it was a lifeform, not some clever invention of yours.” _But you know that_ lies unspoken in the air between them: _you know that and claim credit for terrible things. You are too in love with your own grand conception of yourself._

The soft finger doesn't waver. “The casing was mine, the implementation mine.” The Master shifts in bed, drawing the Doctor closer, until every word sends light breath tingling down his neck. “It would have starved without me,” the Master murmurs. “It depended on me. That makes it mine, I should think.”

Shifting onto his back puts some space between them, so the Doctor does. But it doesn't free him from the designs that the Master would carve into his soul if he'd only had the technology to hand. The uncomfortable dread of the conversation, of the way they are talking at cross purposes, at the way he hopes there is no hidden meaning in what he says, in the knowledge that there must be, there always is — all of it, suffocates.

“Fire,” he replies, to escape the tightness in his chest. “I saw fire.”

That stills the Master's hand. For a moment, the Doctor feels reprieve, some slight amount of validation. The tightness unwinds.

“Fire?” the Master says, incredulously. The gall of it all digs into the delicate space between his particles, dipping into his overflowing cup of anger and dashing hot liquid all along his throat.

“If I'd wanted your opinion on the matter,” the Doctor snaps, “I'll be sure to make a note of it.”

The Master scoffs, but it is more than half a laugh. “Don't sulk so, it does terrible things to your complexion.”

He tries to wind a hand through the Doctor's hair; the Doctor bats it away. The scoff this time is not at all a laugh.

“Fire is such a _base_ fear,” the Master offers abruptly, seemingly by way of explanation. “I hardly thought it—”

“As if I care what you think!” It's petulant and beneath him, maybe beneath them both, but his daily life has become so much of a childish farce that he feels almost justified in it. By day he's sending UNIT out to boltholes he knows the Master cannot be in or foiling one madcap scheme after the other, and by night he has become an errant hypocrite, trying to parse excuses for the Master's amoral violence while they engage in this repulsive pantomime of intimacy.

Their best form of communication has always been telepathic, using touch to soothe away flared tempers brought on by careless words, thoughtless actions. It is also their worst form of communication. His unguarded thoughts aren't meant as an unintended slight; he twists harder at the revulsion, the scorn, winds it in jagged barbs of contempt, until he can feel it pulsing at him like a dark heart of some feral, trapped animal. He doesn't even need to initiate, the fingers now digging into his hip are the perfect vehicle to send it flooding all back. The release feels good, a dizzying high of anger. This will erupt into a fight. The anticipation seethes through him, a tangible thing, heady and restless as he waits for the explosive anger, the fury, the reaction, anything to sink his teeth into and kick back towards, something real.

The hand at his hip slides away and then so too does the Master.

The Doctor's mouth forms half of _where are you going_ before he bites his tongue, and forces himself to be glad it is anywhere but here.

Of course, no exit is complete without a parting shot across the bow.

“One day, Doctor…” The Master turns to look at him. There is something distant in his eyes, and something further, deeper, that is almost reptilian. “And quite soon I imagine, you will come to regret that.”

The Doctor snorts, anger catalysed, and fires his own shot. “I'll expect you again tomorrow.” The Master disappears through the doorway and the Doctor raises his voice, “Shall we say same time, same place?”

The mocking words echo back at him in a dull vibration. He exhales sharply, feeling cheated of a reply, and turns away.

The next moment he's up out of bed, sheets almost tripping him up, as he remembers the Master has access to UNIT and, consequently, the night crew.

Five minutes later, the Doctor has a full head-count of puzzled UNIT staff, and the uneasy prickling of something, some half-formed emotion, resting burr-like against his skin.

He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night, running over the complex, digging into dark corridors and musty file-rooms for any traces of a bomb. Any hints of danger. He checks the Brigadier’s office five times, leaving an upturned mess he knows will infuriate the military man, all the while perfectly aware that a disgruntled Brigadier is far kinder thought than a dead Brigadier.

There’s nothing. Nothing but a few old listening devices, bearing their master’s distinctive mechanical flair. He shoves them into his jacket pockets and, humming distractedly, a melody he knows the Master loathes, returns to the TARDIS.

It is the next morning before the Doctor tries to start the compression stabilizer they had been working on all night. His mind is still mired in thoughts of justification, running over details with the care of someone picking at a scab, and knowing that he absolutely would not change a moment of it. He’s justified in sending his enemy away, and furthermore, is glad that the revocation of his consent to their nightly dalliances will ensure he stays away. For good.

The memory of the flare of pain, curled around his contempt, makes him punch in the confirmation code to test the unit.

With a thin whine, the stabilizer clicks on, and explodes. It almost takes his hand off, his reflexes a half-second too slow.

Jo finds him sprawled out in the lab on his back, laughing, clutching at his burnt wrist, and feeling profoundly, annoyingly relieved.


	6. X

In some universe, it goes like this:

“You won’t keep me here,” the Master says in the beginning, wild-eyed and pale and still so drained. But he has survived worse injuries — certain deaths, even — and the grey cast to his skin will ease eventually. As will the violent shaking neither of them are mentioning. “You can’t keep me here.”

The Doctor agrees.

(The Doctor says nothing.)


	7. V

(The Master has an excellent memory for slights. Thirteen regenerations and a new body have stripped him of form, of grace, of beauty, but they have not dulled this capacity. They collect within him, made no less sharp by the passage of time. Sharper, perhaps. Deadlier, certainly.

He watches the Doctor's TARDIS try to claw its way out of the inexorable pull of Event One. He thinks on every insult, every moment of terror and anger, of discomfort, of humiliation that he has been subject to. This is the sum total of their arguments — the Doctor's death at his hands. His utter triumph.

The pathetic Alzarian mewls with anguish, turns his head away from the screen. The boy will not amount to much if this little display of violence turns his stomach. The Master has been forming and reforming plans ever since he had secured the block computation net from Logopolis — he had intended that the Doctor should power it in the end. Yes, it would have been glorious. All that Time Lord brain bent to his use, his desire, his purpose. It is exactly how the Doctor should be, where they should exist, in alignment — if he is too stubborn to realise this, it is only to his own detriment.

The accident on the radio tower had been an unfortunate irregularity. But the Master hadn't assumed that this simple trap should have been his undoing; the Doctor had an irritating habit of sliding out unscathed from all his intricately designed deaths.

Years of planning, centuries even — and here the Doctor's journey ends, burning out at the beginning of time.

The Master will not look away from his victory.

No matter how unsatisfying.)

He wakes. He has been sleeping. For how long, he can't remember. His throat feels dry. His tongue is thick and alien, resting against his teeth awkwardly. He struggles upwards, pulling himself to one corner of the bed he has been lying on. Draws himself in tightly, knees to his chest. As though if he makes himself as small a target, it will stop this terrible certainty that he is in danger, that he is teetering on the thin blade of disaster.

The room is dark. Nothing stirs in the city outside of it, as though the delicate hours of night have lured everyone to rest. Everyone but him. Time itself seems strange, sluggish in a way he cannot quantify, but soothing, as though it is warping itself in deference to the pain his body can still remember.

Remember? No. No, not quite, he appears to have forgotten. It is as though he is reaching for something and he cannot seem to place his mind to it. If he could just think a little further beyond—

The pain makes him reel, a wave of nausea unsticking his detached wonder. He gags on bile, blinks back tears, at the sharp ache in his head, at the confusion, at the fear that this is what existing must be like. Sudden and inescapable pain. He feels as though this body he inhabits is barely his own. An ill-fitting bundle of limbs — four, at least — that clatters and groans with such terrifying unfamiliarity. Something has gone wrong. Something is going wrong and he doesn't remember who he is.

This shouldn't be possible, that much he knows. If this is the body he inhabits, it must belong to him. It must be his. How can it be anything else? He feels half-sick with fear, feral and desperate in an ugly and visceral way. He hiccups, choking on that sharp bile. It spills out of his mouth unwillingly, and lights up the room in a gold hum of colour.

Bright enough to show someone else waiting in the dark.

He freezes, transfixed with his own, internal terror. Life is cruel and unkind and everything new has been painful. 

“Awake are you, Doctor?”


	8. III

Jo asks him without asking why they never quite seem to kill each other, despite many rather excellent opportunities.

(Because none of them were _perfect_.)

She asks without words why he still seems so fond of the Master, despite everything, all the murder and chaos. 

(Because the Doctor is a blundering fool.)

She asks why the Master has come to Earth, of all places in the universe, to see him.

(Because victory is never sweeter than when he can show it to someone who understands, and the Doctor is the only one who can fill that role.)

He smiles and says, to her unanswered questions, “You might almost say we were at school together.”

It isn’t even a lie.

(Itʼs worse.)


	9. X

Today is a good day. The Master lingers in the console room, for once not trying to jettison rooms or terrorize the native flora. He’s present. Supplying tea. Mostly unblinking, which raises something of a medical concern until, abruptly, his eyes close for several moments.

He has said very little these long hours.

That’s alright though. Today is a good day. The Doctor can feel it, in the way that the air tastes sweeter than usual, the way that colours are especially bright across the ultraviolet spectrum, mint toothpaste resting bubbly on his tongue from this morning.

“Wonderful thing, toothpaste,” he says aloud, to break up the vibrations of his thoughts. “Never been able to replicate that fresh taste — unique, in, in all senses of the word. Unique, hah! Funny word, that.” There, he can taste the word on his tongue, feel it pressing back at him with all the permutations and variations, right back to the bare roots of language. “Latin, you know — it —” He stops talking.

They keep circling what they mean. Perhaps it's kinder that way. Perhaps that's the reason they've been able to coexist for as long as they have been. He keeps his tongue derailed and his thoughts neutral. Things can be easy. They don't need to talk.

But maybe it needs to be difficult. Maybe the way that he struggles to compose sentences, fails to find the right things to say — maybe he's cresting to a breakthrough today.

The lights on the console shine like little stars. There are stars outside, but neither of them are allowed out. Not until it's safe. Not until they've talked.

The enormity of their necessary conversations, the hundreds of years that lies between them, scrabbles to the forefront of his brain, transfixing him, a hard stab of fear and panic that tips too hard at the fragile balance in his head.

He sees the Master's intent eyes, luminous, fixed on him, and stars are all he can think about.

(It takes a surprising amount of time for the drugs to hit the Doctor.

The Master watches his central nervous system slow over hours, his frantic hands lose their strength. His words begin to stall, lodging in his throat, slurring around his voluble tongue.

Hour three, minute fourteen, he turns to the Master. Sweat plasters his shirt and his ridiculous mess of hair, sticking it to his forehead in spiked clumps.

“ _Unus_ ,” says the Doctor. His voice is somehow a plea, high and thin, as if the very force of his feelings can stop the course of the drugs already deep within him. “Meaning alone. _Unicus_ , meaning —” His eyes betray him first, sliding shut in irregular flutters, “meaning last of…” He's panting, slurring. “What have you…?”

The Master grabs him before he can slide to the floor. Then he thinks better of the kindness; the Doctor's head makes a satisfying sound against the floor grating.

Alone at last.

He spares a cursory glance at the console, wanting to pry at it, tear it apart for his freedom. But he can feel the treacherous bitch inside his head. She can be trusted only as far as the Doctor; they both squirm from him, as if he has become a blackened rot, too vile and cancerous a presence for anything but revolted pity.

It's a _pity_ the Doctor isn't dead. One crushed up aspirin in his tea might have been a simpler solution to this farce. The Master had found his stash, hidden in a bathroom cabinet in one of his pet's rooms. Twenty pills left in the packet, and all of them lethal dose.

Then again, the handful of crushed benzos had offered a greater strategic position, portioned across three teas with _milk and sugar and honey thank you, Master._ Valerian root would have been an appealing alternative, but the taste might have overpowered the sweeteners, and there was no rosemary in any of the overgrown gardens in this glorified prison. Half-way committing to a memory is worse than being flexible with planning.

There is silence. He had wanted silence for so long. Centuries of wanting and waiting. Now he drinks his fill. No Doctor gabbling frantically, no extraneous noise, no drumming.

He breathes in and out to four and then, deliberately, five. The fifth hisses out of him through clenched teeth. It meshes poorly with the craving in him for control.

Four seconds: in four, hold four, out four.

It's not enough. There's a delighted panic inside him, rising at the thought of it, how unavoidable that is. It isn't enough, to be cured, to be fixed. He feels unbalanced without them. His mind has tried in all sorts of ways to compensate. The unfocused ringing in his ears hasn't stopped since Rassilon fell back into the time lock. But no matter what tricks this feeble half-regeneration tries to play on him, he knows the truth now.

The Doctor is wrong.)


End file.
